Artist

Paul Simon

Newark, United States · b. 1941

Paul Simon is a musician from Newark, United States, active since 1941. Their discography on Gatefold includes 24 records. They also recorded with Simon & Garfunkel and Tom & Jerry.

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Albums tracked

1,749

In collections

1941

Since

3 projects · 1,749 records in Gatefold collections

Biography

Paul Simon started out under the name Jerry Landis, chasing Doo-Wop trends and trying to sound like a Brill Building hack before he ever found a voice. By the time he hit Columbia, he was a folk-rock machine, but the guy's real trick was a cold-blooded obsession with rhythm over melody. He’d fly to Jamaica just to get the drum sound at Dynamic Sounds Studios for 'Mother and Child Reunion,' or burn through a marriage just to get the right snare snap on 'Hearts and Bones.' He isn't a folk singer. He's a collector of sounds who happens to write lyrics on top. He spent most of the 80s as a has-been after 'One-Trick Pony' and 'Hearts and Bones' died on the charts. Most guys would have packed it in or started playing the hits at state fairs. Instead, he ignored a UN cultural boycott, flew to Johannesburg, and tracked 'Graceland' with musicians like Bakithi Kumalo and Ray Phiri. It was a career-saving move that looked like a PR disaster on paper. He’s spent the decades since experimenting with Brian Eno and choral arrangements, proving he's still the smartest—and often the most stubborn—guy in the room.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of Paul Simon

The pivots — what forced Paul Simon to reinvent.

The Muscle Shoals Pivot
After the split with Garfunkel, Simon ditched the pristine New York vocal stacks and headed to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio to work with the Swampers. You hear the shift immediately on 'There Goes Rhymin’ Simon' where the stiff folk structures give way to gospel and R&B grooves. He was looking for a grease that the folk scene lacked, leaning on the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section to provide a loose, Southern pocket. It turned him from a poetic songwriter into a proper groove-based artist.
The Johannesburg Sessions
Following the commercial failure of 'Hearts and Bones,' Simon became obsessed with a bootleg cassette of South African mbaqanga music. He flew to South Africa in '85 to record with local players, ignoring the political firestorm to capture a specific, rubbery bass tone and accordion-heavy drive. The resulting record, 'Graceland,' didn't just save his career; it changed the way pop music integrated polyrhythmic structures. It felt like a reinvention of the drum kit, trading standard rock beats for a cyclical, percussive energy.
The Sonic Architecture Era
By the mid-2000s, Simon moved away from world-beat explorations toward a dense, glitchy textural focus, most notably on 'Surprise' with Brian Eno. He traded his acoustic foundations for Eno’s 'sonic landscapes' and electronic treatments, creating a weird tension between his precise songwriting and digital chaos. This led to his later work like 'Stranger to Stranger,' where he used custom-made instruments like the Cloud-Chamber Bowls. He became less interested in the song as a story and more interested in the song as a frequency.

Influences

The Everly Brothers — Simon has explicitly stated that 'Bye Bye Love' was the template for Simon & Garfunkel’s vocal blend. You hear it in the tight, two-part harmony and the percussive acoustic guitar strumming that defined the early Columbia years. It’s the DNA of everything they did before they got weird.
Chuck Berry — Before he was a folkie, Simon was a rock and roll obsessive who modeled his early Tom & Jerry guitar playing on Berry’s double-stop riffs. The rhythmic bounce of 'Kodachrome' is just a sophisticated evolution of a Berry shuffle. He took the rock and roll backbeat and sanded it down for a collegiate audience.
Odetta — Simon cites her 1956 album 'Sings Ballads and Blues' as the record that made him trade his electric guitar for an acoustic. Her heavy, rhythmic thumb-picking style is the foundation for his fingerstyle work on 'The Paul Simon Songbook.' She provided the weight that grounded his pop sensibilities.
The Dixie Hummingbirds — He brought this legendary gospel group in to sing on 'Loves Me Like a Rock' because he’d been studying their vocal arrangements since the 50s. You hear their influence in the call-and-response structures he uses to build tension in his solo work. He wasn't just a fan; he hired them to prove he knew the source material.
Jimmy Cliff — Simon traveled to Kingston to record with Cliff’s backing band after being floored by the rocksteady and early reggae coming out of Jamaica. 'Mother and Child Reunion' is one of the first credible examples of a white American artist getting the reggae feel right. It was a direct result of his obsession with Cliff's 'The Harder They Come' era.